Harry Scott Ashmore (July 28, 1916 – January 20, 1998) was an American journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials in 1957 on the school integration conflict in Little Rock, Arkansas. Early life and career Ashmore was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on July 28, 1916. He attended Greenville High School and Clemson Agricultural College where he graduated with a degree in general science in 1937. He showed an early ability in journalism, having served as editor of the student newspapers at both Greenville High School and Clemson College. After graduation from Clemson, Ashmore worked as a newspaper reporter, first at the Greenville Piedmont, and then at the Greenville News. In 1940, Ashmore married Barbara Edith Laier, a physical education teacher at Furman University. Ashmore was accepted for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1941. When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Ashmore left Harvard to join the United States Army, and served as an operations officer (reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel) with the Ninety-fifth Infantry Division, part of the United States Third Army. After the war, Harry Ashmore became the editorial writer at the Charlotte News (in Charlotte, North Carolina). Arkansas Gazette In 1947 Ashmore was recruited to be the editorial writer at the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, Arkansas. He soon became the executive editor at the paper and gained a reputation as a moderate-to-liberal thinker. In 1951 Governor Sid McMath of Arkansas invited Ashmore to address the Southern Governors' Conference when it met at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Ashmore spoke to the governors on civil rights, a contentious subject in southern states, and newspapers around the United States reprinted the speech or excerpts from it. Ashmore wrote the first of his eleven books in 1954. The Negro and the Schools was a report of a Ford Foundation study of segregated education in the South. It was published shortly before the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision ending school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Chief Justice Earl Warren later told Ashmore that the book was used as a source while drafting the 1955 implementation ruling known as Brown II. Also in 1954, Ashmore came to the aid of Orval Faubus, who was running for Governor of Arkansas. Francis Cherry, the incumbent, had tried to smear Faubus by revealing that he had attended Commonwealth College, a socialist school